Periodic Ramblings

A Mexican soccer/football team replaced the names on the back of the player’s jerseys with their Twitter handles.  This is pretty cool.

Read the story here at PC Magazine.

I have always had a penchant for Science Fiction.  It started when I saw Star Wars and the geek in me continues to bring it out.  I had heard that NPR had put together a list of the top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, and therefore was interested in what they picked.  While I do not agree with all the books on the list and would not expect to, the list is pretty complete.  I look forward to revisiting some books and experiencing new books.

HP announced at its 3Q 2011 Earnings call that it was shutting down WebOS hardware development along with exploring alternatives for its Personal Systems Group.  Looks to me like HP is going the IBM route, focusing on enterprise software and services.

There are a lot of things that can be read into this decision.

Is the PC market viable for large players anymore?  Dell seems to do okay, but it is a more lean and nimble company compared to HP.  Lenovo has taken off since its departure from IBM and has become more innovative in its approach to PC design.  Maybe HP was too big and this will help the HP line of computers in the long run.  The companies you hear in the tech news today on the PC side when it comes to innovation are the Asus type companies.  Much smaller and much less diversity, able to focus and innovate in the PC space.

WebOS was not killed, just the devices.  HP obviously still sees some sort of market for WebOS.  I am not sure I agree.  On the phone side, Android has taken lead and in the tablet space, Apple has a good handle there.  Is there room for WebOS.  I do not think so, there would be 5 major players in the mobile space with WebOS (Apple, Android, RIM and Microsoft), with an obvious lead by two of them at this point.  Can you survive at 3, let alone at  4 or 5.  I think Microsoft has a chance here to become the 3rd player, and unless RIM or HP/WebOS can all of a sudden become more innovative and get out of their own way, they should have no problem getting there.

HP is too diverse of a company to maintain status quo.  IBM learned this a number of years ago and stopped development and sold off a number of pieces to maintain a focus in certain areas and has shown it works and is profitable.  HP needs to do the same thing.

I have been meaning to read the Harry Potter books, but never seem to have the time.  These two have put the whole series to song in 99 seconds, saving me a lot of time.

Google announced Wednesday on the Official Google Blog that Bicycle directions are now present within Google Maps.  This adds to the walking, driving and public transit directions that can be selected.  Currently these bicycling directions are present for 150 areas.

If I choose my daily commute from Racine, Wisconsin to Brookfield, Wisconsin, I see that riding my bike would only add about 2 hours and 20 minutes onto the commute.  Maybe driving still is the better options for now.

It was smart enough to choose bike trails that are present in the Milwaukee area and looking at the map, it highlighted other trails that are bike friendly.  So grab your helmet and water bottle and tape your Google Maps directions onto your arm for easy reference.

One of my hobbies is studying weather.  The other day I was watching the local weather here in the Milwaukee area and a snow coverage map was shown of the United States.  I, of course, decided that I needed to spend more time on this and went to the web to see where this information was.  Upon a quick Google search, I came across the National Snow Analyses program at NOAA.

This site contains maps showing the current and historical snow coverage along with other maps of snow/water equivalency and snow melt.  Here is a current snow coverage map for the United States.

Well, it looks as if Barbie will soon be celebrating all of the female geeks out there with their 2010 Computer Engineer Barbie complete with pink laptop. Based on an online vote that Barbie had, the Computer Engineer Barbie won out in the popular vote.

I hope this encourage young girls and women, like my daughter, to go into the science fields.  We need more women in these areas, and if a doll from Barbie can help ignite a passion within a girl that takes her into the field, I am all for it.  Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper would be proud of this.

Click here to see a picture of the proposed doll.

One of the most basic responsibilities within in any large IT organization is ensuring secure, regular and valid backups of the data that is important to the organization.

What once started out as being tape backups with a group of operators switching tapes and sending certain ones offsite, has over the years turned into terabytes of data on disk with offsite replication at remote sites.  And while a large organization can afford to have this type of infrastructure in place, what is the small mom and pop organization to do, or for that matter a home user?

Over the years, I have consulted to a number of small organizations on configuration and setup of their internal networks including the configuration of backup software and setting policy/procedure for ensuring that these backups happen on a regular basis and there is some sort of offsite storage of the data in case of a disaster.  In the beginning I would recommend that once a week, a backup tape be taken offsite and stored at the owner’s house or maybe at another location if the organization had more than one location.  But, as any of us who have been in this business knows, tape backup is not exactly the most reliable, and the due diligence was not always there to rotate the tapes properly or perform periodic restores to ensure the backups were valid. 

As the amount of data to be backed up grew, this became less feasible.  It was not unusual for a small company to still have 100s GB of data that needed to be backed up.  For some we configured a set of external hard drives that were rotated, but this was expensive and not always the most foolproof of designs.  Hard drives were forgotten, used more than one day in a row, or the person who took it home decided they needed to backup their own PC.  Some home users backup to DVDs or CDs, and then store these somewhere.

Today I avoid tape and external storage device backups.  For the a small monthly cost, there are a number of online companies that provide online storage and backup programs that allow you to specify what is backed up, when and how many versions to keep.  The data is sometimes stored on the company’s infrastructure, or they may utilize Rackspace or Amazon S3 for storage. 

What are the benefits from using an online backup facility:

• No physical device to remember to manage.  Whether this is swapping/rotating tapes or external hard drives or a spare server used for backups.
• All data is offsite, so in the case of a building disaster, you still have your data.
• Remote access to data.  You can leverage the secure data access through the backup vendor instead of having to open holes in your firewall to your server and worrying about hackers.
• Piece of mind that your data is safe.

Here are some of the companies that provide online backup services:

• Jungledisk (MAC OSX, Windows, Linux)
• Mozy (Mac OSX, Windows)
• Carbonite (Mac OSX, Windows)

I encourage any of you out there that are still backing up to media that is in your home or business to utilize an online service before you realize that your financial data just went up with the building.

I signed up recently with Foursquare more out of curiosity than anything. Since it is web applications for updating with your current location, it only made sense to download the iPhone application also.

The application for Foursquare is pretty simple and straight forward. The main screen lists your friends and where they last checked in along with a button to check in yourself. When you go to Check-In, you can either select a location that Foursquare knows about in your general location or search for a new location.

The application itself works well, updates and searches were quick. My only complaint is that around lunch time, I tend to get a connection failure message frequently. I know it is not a 3G or WiFi problem, because I am able to surf the web and check email at the same time. I realize that the lack of pizazz around the app will turn some people off, but for me the simplicity was what made me keep coming back to it.

Here in the United States we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, commemorating the work of one of the greatest Civil Rights Activists in history.

TED has posted the following page complete with his “I Have A Dream” speech.